1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to document editing techniques. More specifically, the present invention relates to document editing techniques for extracting elements of structured documents and generating a desired output document.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is known in the art to extract necessary elements from a plurality of documents and deal with them for generating an output document. A conventional editing technique for obtaining such an output document is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 6-259421. According to this conventional technique, the elements of the structured input document are extracted using matches of character sequences with the elements in the document, a sequence connector, a hierarchy connector, etc.
However, the aforesaid conventional technique is not provided with an element connector and thus, it is undesirably required to use one character pattern for establishing a match with the element in the document and extracting the matched element. In other words, if a plurality of different elements are to be extracted, the same number of different character patterns are necessary.
Further, the aforesaid conventional technique is unable to extract a plurality of elements while maintaining relationship of the elements extracted. This is because the elements extracted using different character patterns are independent with one another.
The conventional technique in question is provided with a sequence connector for extracting a plurality of elements in sequence. However, the conventional technique is not provided with any connector via which a plurality of elements are extracted in parallel in any order. Therefore, it is difficult to extract a plurality of elements from input documents if the arrangement order of elements is